He's Gay and She's an Alien (Enlightenment)

Yes. Total Eclipse of the Heart really was at number onewhen this image was on television. And you thoughtDoctor Who had lost touch with the zeitgeist.

It’s March 1st, 1983. Michael Jackson is at number one insisting that Billie Jean is not his lover. Lower in the charts are the Eurythmics (with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” of course), Bananarama, Toto, and Tears for Fears. But for the purposes of this entry perhaps the most significant fact about the charts is Bonnie Tyler hitting number one in the second week of this story with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is notable for several reasons, one of which is that it is one of the gayest songs ever written, so, you know. Thematically apropos, that.

In real news, there’s not a lot. The compact disc goes on sale in England sometime in March, so let’s give that to this story. The final episode of M*A*S*H aired between Terminus and this. Bob Hawke becomes Prime Minister of Australia, and the IBM PC/XT is released.

So on television we have Enlightenment. Which is a fantastic little story with one of the most wonderfully captivating central images in Doctor Who. Barbara Clegg is, of course, not the first person to put tallships in space, but it’s such a reliably wonderful image that she really ought to get proper amounts of praise for it. On top of that you have a story that effortlessly moves from historical texture to science fantasy in a way that offers one of the most thorough blurring of genres in Doctor Who, has a bunch of clever ideas and good characters, and is all around one of the gems of the Davison era. None of which I want to talk about today, because it's well covered by other sources and I don't have a ton to add to the discussions of why this is good. I want to talk about Turlough.

The first thing we should establish is that Turlough is the first companion that it is overwhelmingly easier to read as homosexual than not. There have been homoerotic undertones to companions before, and there’s been the unfortunate consequence of being played by Richard Franklin, but there’s never before been a companion who is so consistently and from the top down conceptualized in gay tropes. It’s not, in the case of Turlough, a subtext. Turlough is gay. Through and through, Turlough is gay.

For the sake of completion, let’s enumerate the various ways in which this is coded. Turlough is overtly “cowardly,” deliberately played as an unmasculine character. He’s repeatedly shown to be delicate and fragile. He’s introduced in the context of an all-boys school, and seen leading another boy to temptation and ruin. And that’s before you get to moments like his first scene with Captain Wrack in episode three of Enlightenment. He’s thrown to the ground by strapping young men and told to “crawl.” He slowly makes his way across the floor to come to the leather boots of an unseen figure. And who, exactly, is this figure that Turlough looks up at in sheer and unbridled terror? A female pirate queen who, in staggeringly camp fashion, declares him “just what I’ve been waiting for” before swinging a sword around cavalierly. Not until Terror of the Vervoids will the vagina dentata be quite so blatantly literalized in Doctor Who.

(It’s worth pointing out that Captain Wrack is as consciously designed as a gay icon as any female character in Doctor Who not to be the Rani is - the overpowering man-eating woman who visibly wears the pants and is more masculine than any of the lumbering pieces of manflesh who follow her is archetypal. Think of her as a drag queen who happens to be played by a woman. Not for nothing was the woman in question, Lynda Baron, brought back in Closing Time to riff on the notion that the Doctor and Craig are lovers.)

There’s also a degree of authorial intent that can be applied here. John Nathan-Turner was himself gay. Although I am sharply disinclined to use this as prima facie evidence that there is a queer subtext to the Nathan-Turner era, especially because there’s a whole ugly tradition of homophobic attacks on Nathan-Turner (though as Tat Wood points out in About Time the most high profile of those attacks came from a fanzine with a gay editor, so that’s all somewhat more complex than it appears and I’m not going to touch it with a forty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole). But even if Nathan-Turner is not taken as the author for the purposes of the queer subtext it is difficult not to take him as party to it. Simply put, there’s no way in hell anyone who was even remotely aware of gay culture couldn’t have noticed that Turlough was being presented as gay in these three stories. For better or worse, there’s no plausible deniability here.

But it’s worth remarking on exactly what sort of homosexual Turlough is presented as being. Here I should offer a hat tip to Meredith Collins, whose dissertation on the subject of the aesthetic novel provided me with invaluable background for making this argument and who, perhaps more importantly, is awesome. Which I suppose also sets up the sort of homosexual I’m arguing Turlough is presented as being, namely that of an aesthete.

Certainly the tropes are all there. Turlough is exceedingly cosmopolitan in his tastes, in particular in Mawdryn Undead where his knowledge of alien technology is constantly played off of the “provincial” nature of contemporary Earth. But more striking is his first appearance, admiring a classic car. This sort of appreciation of the beauty of mundane objects is textbook aestheticism (which was, in a particularly famous Punch cartoon, parodied as worshipping teapots). Add to that his seducing another young boy to ruin, a textbook aesthetic plot, and you have the general shape of the character fairly well pegged. (The aesthetic movement, to be clear, is intimately connected with homosexuality, with same-sex attractions, both spoken and loudly unspoken, permeating the movement.)

But what’s particularly interesting about the aesthetic structure is a focus on the lengthy exploration of a moral choice in which the negative choice is explored at length. Which is exactly what we get for the twelve episodes of the so-called Black Guardian Trilogy (though he’s an exceedingly minor character in the trilogy - the Turlough Trilogy would be wholly more apropos). Or, at least, what we get for eight episodes with four episodes of him crawling around some ductwork shoved in the middle. Turlough is given a moral choice - betray and kill the Doctor or not - and spends the whole of the trilogy dithering over it, generally committing to the idea that he will kill the Doctor but not actually ever doing much of anything to accomplish it.

All of this could basically be written off as peculiarities of Mawdryn Undead if it weren’t for the fact that the story arc is book-ended on the other side by Enlightenment, a story about a bunch of bored decadents who like dressing up in the trappings of various exotic cultures and having yacht races. Which is to say, more aesthetes. At this point the series is practically begging for it.

But if we take this as the setup for Turlough, what do we make of the endpoint of this story arc? After all, the point of dallying with the negative choice in aestheticism is, ultimately, the idea that there is beauty in what is forbidden and profane. In which case Turlough’s wholesale rejection of the Black Guardian at the end of this story seems to be in part a repudiation of his coding as homosexual. This is an unfortunate endpoint, to say the least.

Several alternative ways to argue through this do seem to present themselves, and it’s worth exploring them quickly. First and foremost is the fact that the usual hullabaloo about the ambiguously oppositional relationship between the Black and White Guardians is on display here, cutting against the idea that the Black Guardian is evil. The problem is that this means taking one scene at the end of Enlightenment as more central to the understanding of the Guardians than all the moments where the Black Guardian shows up shouting things like “In the name of all that is evil, the Black Guardian orders you to destroy him now!” and cackling like he’s played by Valentine Dyall or something. The Guardians have been impossible to take seriously as a concept since their debut, where they came pre-skewered by Robert Holmes.

A second, somewhat cheekier approach would be to suggest that Turlough is only trading one model of queerness for another. Certainly, as I’ve already argued, Davison’s Doctor is a strong contender for the most slashable Doctor in the classic series. So Turlough breaks up with his abusive boyfriend and goes with the Doctor. But if we’re being honest there’s a circularity to this. Davison is slashable as much because he’s surrounded by at least one of Adric, the Master, or Turlough in all but three stories of his run. And one of those is Snakedance. He has, in other words, the incidental combination of being young, played by a television star known for more feminine series, and being the only Doctor since Pertwee to have a male companion in a majority of his stories (though at present Smith is at 17/22 stories featuring a male companion, with next season not set to send him below a majority). I’ll readily grant that the show is overtly coding Turlough as gay. Davison’s Doctor, not so much.

A third defense, which is at least slightly more satisfying, comes by just trying to deconstruct the ending. The declaration that “enlightenment was the choice” is obviously supposed to indicate that for Turlough enlightenment was the act of escaping the Black Guardian’s control. But if we take the long view of the choice, treating it as the entire twelve episode arc, then enlightenment is the same extended dalliance with corruption that is partially responsible for coding Turlough as gay in the first place. But while this works, it just feels smugly clever.

No, let’s go with a fourth defense, which is that the deferral of and stepping back from same-sex desire is part and parcel of what aestheticism does. Aesthetic novels are awash with points at which potentially scandalous details are visibly elided, the most famous of which is probably the moment in The Picture of Dorian Gray in which Dorian is told, “your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read,” but no information about the content of the confession is actually forthcoming. In other words, aestheticism constantly performed precisely this double gesture of alluding to some scandalous content - generally implied, if not outright said, to be homosexual - and visibly obscuring it.

This is, of course, a subset of the larger category of the closet, with which gay culture at large has an ambiguous relationship with to this day. But in 1983 it was still a fairly straightforward one. Homosexuality may have been decriminalized, but it was nowhere close to destigmatized, especially in the face of the dawning AIDS crisis that was in the midst of decimating the gay male community. Clause 28 looms over 1983 as surely as the hiatus looms over Season 20. The consequence of this is something we talked about the last time the series was getting fabulously gay, which is that gay culture became defined in part by the ways in which it hid itself. This has been tacitly clear through the whole of this post, where I’ve been using words like “coded” to describe how we know Turlough is gay. Because coding was, in 1983, still a huge part of how gay culture self-identified and how people in the gay community successfully identified each other. It’s misleading to talk about Turlough’s homosexuality as subtext in this regard. Yes, it’s never explicitly stated. But that doesn’t mean it’s not completely explicit - homosexuality, in the culture of the time, always existed in code and subtext.

(The nature of the closet in the present day is tremendously conflicted, I should note. On the one hand, major battles have been won in terms of acceptance of homosexuality that obviate the need for the closet. On the other hand, gay culture has existed for decades with the closet as a major force, making its removal the occasion for some real ambivalence and anxiety due to it threatening the makeup of the culture. The debates within the gay community over gay marriage, with a small but significant section of the community arguing that gay marriage serves to functionally “straighten” their relationships are one of many, many examples.)

So if we treat Turlough’s storyline as a mirroring of the classic aesthetic structure then the fact that it ends with a phoned in attempt to defuse it and take Turlough out of his decadent gay lifestyle is hardly a big deal. It’s exactly the sort of closeting move that defines aesthetic literature and the gay community more generally. The fact that there’s an overt turn away from some of the tropes that code Turlough as gay really can’t be fairly taken as a rejection of homosexuality in a meaningful sense. Anyone who was aware of the coding up to that point would also have seen it as an inevitable and necessary part of grappling with the subject on a BBC1 family program in 1983. It doesn't change the basic fact that the series, at this point, would have been visibly gay-friendly.

(Note: The following paragraph was added a few hours after the entry posted. Hat tip to Alex Wilcock and William Whyte, who's comments inspired the central insight.)

Indeed, the ambiguities of the ending need not be taken as undermining the point at all. A somewhat tortured relationship with the tropes of homosexuality is itself a useful commentary on them. The extended meditation on a negative moral choice that the Black Guardian represents is part of Turlough's gay coding. So, of course, are many of his more villainous traits. But does anyone seriously look at post-Enlightenment Turlough and stop seeing the gay coding? Of course not. He's gay through to Planet of Fire. His rejection of the Black Guardian, in that case, is not a rejection of homosexuality, but of a particular subset of stereotypes about homosexuality. Taken this way, "enlightenment was the choice" takes on another meaning, given that this scene also marks where he "comes out" to Tegan and the Doctor as having been an agent of the Black Guardian. (And the implication, of course, is that the Doctor knew all along. As did Tegan, who long suspected that there was "something funny" about Turlough, so to speak.) By rejecting the Black Guardian and making an affirmative claim to his identity Turlough comes out instead of just being outed. The choice thus consists of him having his cake and eating it too - he remains situated in a long tradition of gay culture while at the same time vocally rejecting those aspects of the culture that are negative stereotypes. Turlough's arc, in this reading, is about a broader question of what gay culture is. And its very existence on BBC1 demonstrates the relevance of this - gay culture clearly was emerging into the mainstream, and its emergence raises the exact questions this reading situates the story as answering.

As I’ve noted, the prominence of various sorts of homosexual coding in the John Nathan-Turner era in no way begins with Mawdryn Undead, and we’re still not up to either of the two most overt engagements with a gay audience in the classic series (Time and the Rani and The Happiness Patrol, since someone is going to ask). But the Turlough arc marks what is probably the most extended treatment of the issue in the classic series. And, of course, all of this is worth discussing in part because Doctor Who’s engagement with the gay community is a fundamental part of its revival. This may not be the era of Doctor Who that Russell T. Davies grew up with, but there’s no mistaking the fact that there’s a coherent line of influence from the homosexual coding that takes place under Nathan-Turner’s watch to the nature, if not the very fact, of its return in 2005.

Comments

Does it make sense to read the rejection of the Black Guardian not as a rejection of queerness but as a natural stage in a coming-of-age story? As you say, Turlough is coded as gay before the Black Guardian shows up in Mawdryn Undead: so what we have is a mature but sinister mentor guiding / tempting him through a transition to adulthood, who he then rejects at the end of it as part of moving on from having a mentor and becoming a full person. This isn't a particularly gay story -- it's the story of Little Red Riding Hood, for example.

The problem, of course, with this rite-of-passage / be who you want to be interpretation, is that Turlough ends up being the Doctor's companion, and to be a companion is necessarily to be infantilized. But the nice thing about this is that Turlough's story ends with him voluntarily leaving the Doctor and accepting his responsibilities as an adult.

Also worth noting, on the side of the ledger against reading this as a repudiation of homosexuality, are that Turlough stays gay. Those shorts in Planet of Fire? None more gay.

Also, when discussing authorial intent, wasn't Peter Grimwade gay too? I don't think this affects the argument on one side or the other, but just for the sake of completeness.

Grimwade was certainly gay, and I find it impossible to believe he didn't have the queer subtext of "British public schoolboys" very definitely in his mind when he wrote "Mawdryn Undead". Note that Turlough keeps the costume.

Also gay is Ian Levine, who was the first resident DJ at gay megaclub Heaven in the early '80s. Not that that's relevant here, I just think it's funny.

Hmm. Up to a point, Lord Sandifer. Not unconvincing, as once again Doctor Who steps back to fin de siècle, but as you and William both supply background details, I’d have said that the more gay contributors were on board with Turlough, the less probable it would seem that he’d be constructed so highly out of anti-gay stereotypes and still be intended to have that reading (weak, cowardly, insincere… All associated with the Evil Gay on film). He’s also much less camp than almost anything around him…

On the other hand, I have occasionally been known to send in one-liners to DWM’s Time Team, and they made an interesting change when printing one for this story:Why do they need to save space by giving Turlough Adric’s room? And, as in between stories Turlough’s been chatting up the Doctor, winding up Tegan and getting down to sabotage – obviously taking some time – where’s he been sleeping in all the days we missed?Became:Why do they need to save space by giving Turlough Adric’s room? And since in between stories Turlough’s been sucking up to the Doctor, winding up Tegan and getting down to some sabotage – obviously taking some time – where’s he been sleeping all that time?It looks like they thought the idea of Turlough “chatting up” the Doctor was a little too risqué, but I’m not sure they really thought through their bowdlerism; as my other half put it, “Where could Turlough have been sleeping in the nights when he was fellating the Doctor?”

Nothing to make of this story being the first Doctor Who story from both a woman writer and a woman director? Whether or not that was a significant factor, it’s always intrigued me that this is such a disturbingly askew take on a love story rather than ‘the usual’.

And, as I’ve been keeping tabs on the underlying themes in my own Black Guardian Trilogy review, it’s worth noting that this is yet another tale of travellers doomed to wander in an “echoing voyage,” now underscoring the ‘Flying Dutchman’ feel with wandering spirits, powerful but empty, with yet another dose of subtle vampirism from the parasitic aristocrats, who have – like Mawdryn – far more of an ‘aesthete’ coding than Turlough.

It makes some sense, but as I said, if you take this story as working with the aesthetic tropes I argue for, the Black Guardian and the extended meditation on a negative moral choice is part and parcel of the gay coding. Which is, I think, what makes the matter interesting in the first place. Yes, Turlough would be easily argued as gay even without the Black Guardian plot, but he's not only gay, he's gay and put in a plot ripped right out of iconic gay literature.

I'm not sure it follows that gay contributors would have been less likely to construct Turlough out of anti-gay stereotypes. As I noted, the most high profile homophobic attacks on Nathan-Turner came from a fanzine with a gay editor. Which is to say that the gay community has always had a complex relationship with its own negative stereotypes. To fast-forward, are we also going to be surprised that Russell T. Davies makes Stuart such a blatant negative stereotype in Queer as Folk?

That said, as I write this, I do see a rather substantial addition to make to the post that I'm about to go edit in. :)

I take your point, but it's still, I think, evidence against - as is that Turlough is so much further down the 'aesthete' scale than, say, Mawdryn and Striker in the same stories. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do think it's nowhere near as cut-and-dried as you present it.

And to fast-forward, yes, Stuart fitted into several negative stereotypes... But he was also that series' most massively strong and empowered - and honest - character, not something that could be said of many other gay TV characters before then (and never of Turlough, until he's literally coded as a family man), and by definition he wasn't the only gay man in the series; Queer As Folk was groundbreaking not because it had one gay character who had to embody everything, but because it showed a lot of us, none made from pure stereotypes, positive or negative. In short, a drama. So taking 'the one' read-as-gay character out of context has a wholly different meaning from taking 'one of a whole series of' openly gay characters out of context; if there were more LGBT characters on TV even today, I suspect there'd be far fewer complaints than there are when a series' token gayer is too camp / too invisible / too slutty / too virginal / too dead at the end or whatever other old stereotype people get weary of when there's no variety of characters to be characters rather than tropes.

Also, as I said under Mawdryn, I think a far more obvious reading of Turlough is that he's a dark mirror of the Doctor - the Third Doctor, in particular, which is another of those reasons that the Brigadier suits the story far better than the intended Ian (and it would have been far more heart-wrenching to have Ian without Barbara than the Brigadier without his uniform).

After 198 posts, we've finally got one where i think that you're the least steady on your feet with regards to your summation of the themes in the story and its finale.

There is no question that Turlough coded as gay from the start, but i think that you're making the final lines of the story too cut and dried. I've always seen his repudiation of the Black Guardian as a larger part of his acceptance of his sexuality: he knows it, but now he knows that everyone else knows it, and he starts to make different choices about who he is going to "listen" to. The black guardian comes across as an older manipulative "boyfriend" shaming and cajoling Turlough into doing what he wants. And he finally gets tossed out when Turlough has had enough abusive behavior.

I've never quite gotten the slash fiction on a lot of characters (the Kirk/Spock thing: kinda), but since Davison's Doctor has shown a complete lack of interest in Nyssa or Tegan, its not difficult to imagine him weakening to his attraction to the forbidden fruit: Turlough, the submissive agent sent to kill him. Now that's a good case for sexual attraction.

The dark mirror of the Doctor interpretation doesn't work for me, because Turlough doesn't seem, well, special enough. The fact that he's not from Earth is just a thing about him, not a characteristic that gives him unusual technology or powers of insight. Pertwee, like him or not, stood out in UNIT. Turlough is clearly not seen as exceptional by anyone in the school. Frankly, to be a dark mirror of the Doctor, you have to be a star, which is why I think it works for Linx and Davros (in different ways) but not particularly for Turlough.

That's fair enough, but surely it's not in tune with Philip's argument?

Within the school (as the other boys and the Headmaster all say) he does stick out, just not as an alien exile... But isn't that part of how he contrasts with the Doctor, that he's a liar and a coward? Yet he's still shut up with the Brigadier, who also was once special and is now just another teacher. As Philip argues, it's not necessarily right to say you have to be terribly glamorous and have exciting adventures to count. I'd go further and say that if you think it is about the Brigadier coming down in the world, then his new 'exile' must, too.

It has never and would never have occurred to me that Turlough might be gay. Perhaps this is because I'm ginger, went to an all-boys school with a very similar uniform, am generally quite feeble and cowardly, am a sensitive aesthete (I write songs, and screenplays with strong female leads, and I got into Formula 1 because I liked all the different coloured helmets)... and spend most of my time daydreaming about girls. Sigh, girls.

Maybe I never looked into it that deeply, maybe I just see Doctor Who as sexless and Turlough in particular as alien, but I don't buy it as being that obvious. Yes, he *could* be gay, but he just as easily could be a sensitive/alien straight man; or he could simply, and more easily, be a non-specific fictional character in a generally sexless fictional universe.

Incidentally, and for the sake of completeness, it's a shame you've "skipped" Enlightenment, as this was one of the most evocative stories of my childhood, and I think it deserved more than to be a hook onto which to hang Turlough.

Although a lot of the Gay (sub)text in Turlough's character was probably written in intentionally, as you claim, I maintain a big part of it is the draconian no-hugging-no-kissing-no-affection-of-any-sort dictum laid down at the start of the John Nathan-Turner era. Peter Davison jokes about it, but it's true that he wasn't allowed to show much warmth at all towards Nyssa and Tegan so the only companions he was ever allowed to get close to or show any kind of affection for in character were Adric and Turlough. Can't have the kids thinking The Doctor might have ghastly, horrid FEELINGS for his female travelling companions, can we? No siree, especially not after how naughty and inappropriate Tom Baker and Lalla Ward were. Love and sexuality are evil, sinful things and emotions are for the weak.

Yes it's 30 years later and I do still have a chip on my shoulder, why do you ask?

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned the Misos triangle branded on Turlough's arm in the very next story; that seems to me to be a clear and intended reference to the pink triangles used to identify gay people by the Nazis (and, at the time of the broadcasting of these episodes, being 'reclaimed' as a gay pride insignia before the rainbow flag eventually and more positively replaced it).

I wholly agree about the triangle. 'Bent', the Martin Sherman play about the homosexual experience in the concentration camps was revived in the 1980s and the triangle was on all gay journals. It would have been very familiar to the gay members of the production team.

There seems too to be a conscious parallel drawn in the script of 'Mawdryn Undead' between Turlough's concealed identity as an alien and the closet, as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the 'Epistomology of the Closet'. Turlough has something to hide and that is that he is an alien refugee of some kind. The concealment of the alien identity is better effected by the emotional isolation of the character by means of a great emphasis in the script upon the tropes of 'gayness' in pre-1980s British - and, if Gore Vidal's accounts of 'the sissy' are anything to go by, American - culture (ie his aesthecism, anti athleticism and intellectual superiority). These traits may have been given to the character for this reason, with the intended ironic effect that they were also the traits of the adolescent 'pre-gay' male so widely reported in British public school culture. Whether that makes the character of Turlough gay too is another matter. In the original series - I hate calling it 'classic' - Steven may be retroactively constructed as gay (no particular interest in women and the owner of a toy panda) but the performance does not support the reading and I think Turlough falls into the same category.

To misquote Jesssica Rabbit. 'He's not Gay he's just drawn that way'. It might be useful to differentiate between 'Gay' and 'Queer' here. Indeed, while we're about it - and before we get into the Brett Anderson 'Bisexual who has never had a Gay experience' explanation/excuse - while I recognise what you're suggesting (and BTW I,to a large extent, agree)surely without a scene explicitly depicting it (unlikely at the time) any speculation regarding Turlough's sexual orientation is just that - speculation. He's not a real person he's a fictional character. Bloody hell he's not even supposed to be human so attributing specifically 20th century Western Gay tropes and signifiers to him is a bit of a reach and really quite slashy in itself. The subtext, via JNT and the contempory fanbase/writers is undoubtably there but this just isn't the same as your previous Whittaker inspired claiming of the show for Hermetic Alchemy/Mercury/Odin/Chaos Monkeys/whatever..Is it?

I would note that thogh some commenters seem to have got the wrong end of the stick, Dr Sandifer was careful not to write anything about the character's actual sexual orientation: the good doctor is writing entirely about the symbology that surrounds the character, which (unlike the sexual orientation of a fictional character who is never seen having any sexual responses whatsoever) is somethig that actually does exist and can be written about.

Basically: Turlough, as a fictional character, can't be 'gay'. That would be silly. Fictional characters can't 'be' anything. They can, however, represent, and Turlough could, in some way, represent 'gayness' or a particular kind or in a particular historical context.

For another reading, Turlough's exile to the public school could be read as Christ's period in the desert. Like Christ, Turlough is tempted three times (three successive adventures) by evil, and again like Christ, he has the opportunity to obtain his freedom, to die (and be brought back to life) and to become a ruler of many. Peter Grimwade, brought up in a Christian context in the late 1940s and 1950s, would have known the gospel story well. Such parallels eased the consumption of the story to the contemporary audience in 1983 (less so now, one suspects). Grimwade would also have had the good taste not to foreground the parallels; current writers take note.

One might also suggest that Turlough also has overtones of Judas Iscariot, represented with red hair, with the partial exception that Mark Strickson was reportedly asked to dye his blond hair that colour to avoid confusion with Peter Davison in long shot.

I agree with all the discussion that's popped up over the night. I just wanted to clarify I wasn't trying to "gossip about imaginary people" at all, just point out another way in which the symbology of the story and production of the show helped contribute to a particular interpretation.

Well, that and get in a few more snarks at John Nathan-Turner and Mary Whitehouse's expense.

I don't know what bearing the name "Turlough" has on this topic. A turlough is a type of lake found in limestone areas of Ireland which floods when the water table is high and drains when the water table is low (in summer).

This may be of great intended significance. Or it may just be there as an Irish placename, like Gallifrey.

I hope you weren't including my reply as one of those who'd 'got the wrong end of the stick'(and I'm assuming the innuendo was intended). On the contrary I was trying to reinforce and clarify Doc. Sandifer's original thesis that Turlough could indeed be read as a gay signifier but thought it might be helpful to the discussion to indicate, as you did, that as a creature of fiction he cannot 'be' Gay. This also leads me to wonder, in light of the whole 'Abdication of the role of Master of the Land of Fiction' trope assigned to the Doctor in the Mind Robber entry, whether there's any mileage in talking about the very thing you propose - that 'Fictional characters can't 'be' anything. They can, however, represent' and perhaps this is why the Doctor can't 'be' sexual in any real sense? For example in the current incarnation his relationship with River seems totally fictitious and mostly happens off screen. What I wonder in this context does the Doctor then 'represent'?

Picking up on a completely different comment, I'd like to vote for the Axon spacecraft as the most obvious manifestation of a vagina dentata - it's mostly buried in the earth, but the entrance way sticks out, and is an oval shape with a toothed circular door in the centre (see http://cdn.static.ovimg.com/episode/297398.jpg). And the Axons themselves of course are all sticky and organic and desired by men for their beauty and fecundity yet are actually deadly. Etc.

I was gonna skip all of Season 20, but a friend kept reccomending this as one of the "best" Davison stories, so I figured I'd make an exception.

It does have a clever concept, the designs are nice, several of the characters are very intriguing. However, some of the dialogue is positively awful. I just ran across a reference somewhere earlier today that said it wasn't until the McCoy era that dialogue began to sound like actual conversation again, instead of "essays", and I can see the point. In all fairness (not that this excuses anything), ST:TNG suffers from this even more than WHO at its worst.

The crew are the most natural characters, you get a really "friendly" feel from all of them. Too bad they mostly disappear after Part 1. The main Eternals are all fascinating, from determined to creepy to flamboyant-as-hell and her sidekick (who, the instant he started talking, I said to myself, "Now that guy is DEFINITELY gay!!!" (which never even crossed my mind about Turlough, even though I'd already read this blog post a month ago).

Tegan is awful in here (and this was supposed to be her best story?? --AUGH!!!) and Turlough needs to tone it down a few notches. The Black Guardian, ditto. A shame Tom Baker wasn't still around for this, I'd like to have seen his having a 2nd confrontation with The White Guardian.

Overall, not bad, but I feel it would have been much better without the whole "Black Guardian" plotline. Truthfully, it doesn't come alive until Wrack appears, and while some have said she's way too OTT for a "empty" Eternal, I say thee nay, she's no doubt living it up BECAUSE of all her human crew.

Now, how come The Doctor has gotten so much better at precise hops with the TARDIS, yet still can never get Tegan or Turlough back to their home planets? That fall from the radar dish really scrambled his brain, and for at least 3 whole years.

Funny thing-- Keith Barron (this story) and Anthony Ainley (next story) both appeared together as Nazi u-boat crewmembers in Amicus' "THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT" (the same people who gave us "INVASION EARTH: 2150 A.D."). Which makes me think, too bad The Doctor and Tegan weren't played by Doug McClure & Susan Penhaligon.

I really don't agree with a lot of this. A shortened version of what this is saying would, in essence, be "It's 1983, so Turlough was gay.". I was rewatching Terminus and Frontios and wondering about Turlough's place in what has clearly emerged in JNT's Doctor Who term. I never cared for Davison as the Doctor, and I take it now many Americans did not. The statement back then was each actor was to be the opposite of predecessor, but Davison to me was too young, clearly supposed to be a boyishly handsome prettyboy. Davison clearly sought to be anti-social and disagreeable as Hartnell established, but whereas Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee and T. Baker came across as crotchety or set in their ways, Davison's youthfulness made it look like he had a childish attitude, especially when he was angry toward Adric or Tegan. I watch Logopolis and Castrovalva and recall how promising (I thought) the quartet looked and how disappointing it all turned out. When it was all over and I learned JNT was gay, I began to notice the peculiarities, mainly with Mawdryn Undead, with how the 'menacing aliens' looked like aged drag queens. But all of this about Turlough being gay because he was coaxing the friend to steal the car. I have to heartily disagree. With this logic, Bart Simpson and Milhouse Van Houten are a gay couple. Spanky and Alfalfa are a gay couple. And as for Wrack being a gay icon because she was a strong woman (tho I'd say she was threatening), had this been a man playing Wrack, it would have STILL had gay undertones, one way or another. That really does limit who could depict Wrack!Had it been a ROBOT in the role of Wrack: R2D2 image, well, that would have been depicting a penis, obviously!C3PO, oh, that' s a boy toy! After a while, it's a no-win situation. This is basically what I am seeing on Doctor Who, again with the Doctor getting younger and younger. While I liked Eccleston and Tennant, I really was not crazy about how young either one was. Still they were fun, but Matt Smith, no matter how good he was, it just wasn't the Doctor. It was silly playing. And Smith's voice sounded more like Tennant than Brandon Routh did Chris Reeve in the Superman effort. These young Doctors, to me, all looked like little fancies, and I look forward to Capaldi taking over. I've already heard he is supposed to be a return to 'the second Doctor'. The same thing was said about Colin Baker (and again, look at what a disaster that turned out to be!) I don't understand what the intention is in channeling Troughton, but no one is succeeding. I'd guess once C. Baker succeeded in losing the American audience, the quick decision was made to bring in Sylvester McCoy. Of all the Doctors, Troughton and McCoy have borne the closest physical resemblance. I'd say Turlough's earliest depiction was he was supposed to be sly and clever, very crafty. Just like Adric's mathematical skills, that fell apart very quickly and never came into use. And I don't understand why Turlough was an alien on Earth. None of that made sense to me. As for Total Eclipse of the Heart, disagree on it being a gay song, and don't understand why you think so. With Boy George in Culture Club, Annie Lennox dressed as a man, Duran Duran sporting long hair and makeup, androgynous attire, unisex hair cuts (thanks, Thompson Twins), the atmosphere which would give way to Frankie Goes To Hollywood, NO ONE was saying Total Eclipse of the Heart was the gayest thing around. Madonna was just around the corner. Why would anyone focus on Bonnie Tyler as some gay icon with an anthem?

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Jubal
2 years, 9 months ago

An awful lot of your points I agree with. Wrack is, after all, the third most blatant fag hag in all of Doctor Who, falling just behind the Rani and Iris Wildthyme, and just ahead of River Song.

Still, I never viewed Turlough as being gay, even codedly. This is because, from my reading, he and Tegan are blatantly shagging like rabbits by the end of his first story. (Yes, they still hate each other and fight like cat and dog. This is hardly unrealistic).